I have been thinking about switching to brave for better fingerprinting protection
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So Chromium?
Just use Firefox, its the better browser anyways.
Almost all of my Linux devices have both chromium-browser and Firefox installed. Firefox is my default, but there are some apps out there that work a lot better in something chromium-based.
Ungoogled-chromium is a good substitute in that case
Haven’t used Ungoogled Chromium in a couple years, but I’ve seen some criticisms of it even compared to regular Chrome: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
Thank you for sharing this, I was unaware. I wonder if any of this has been addressed recently as the linked article is two years old (not demeaning its value, just wondering if the devs saw the article and decided to improve ungoogled-chromium).
They still disable CRLSets and have binaries built by “contributors” not in an automated fashion by the developer themselves.
Yeah, that’s why I pointed out that I haven’t used it in a couple years, I have no idea about the direction development took after that, so maybe some folks that work on the development of Chromium and its many forks can give us some insight. Personally, I just decided to stick to Firefox tweaked with Arkenfox as my main browser on desktop and I have Brave with all its annoyances turned off as a backup option
No one is going to develop exploits only for a browser with certain default security options disabled (especially these made at compile time using toolchain). Binary exploitation is hard, and extremely not worth the effort in this case.
Disabling CRLSets though is worrisome, and its binaries are built by potentially unknown third parties with compromised systems.
Brave might have started as a basic Chromium fork, but the various privacy/security features they added do make them standout now.
It is really disingenuous to say “X is just a skin of Y” just because they share the same browser engine or are forked from the same browser. Like you say, there are a lot of changes.
I feel that it is relevant to bring up that it is a fork of chromium. Less informed users who are leaving Chrome (or almost every other browser) for ideological reasons may be uninformed about what is under the hood and not know why someone would choose a Firefox based browser instead.
But they still contribute to google’s monopoly over web standards.
I already use Firefox but brave is just better at fingerprinting protection
There’s CanvasBlocker for Firefox that can do fingerprint protection.
Arkenfox is also good at protection from naive fingerprinting
Adding add-on makes you more fingerprintable, not less.
It depends. Many addons have effects that can be tested for and fingerprinted, but it’s not always straight forward. There’s a way to detect any specific chrome extension, but doesn’t work on firefox because it uses unique extension ids per person.
With addons like CanvasBlocker, they generate random values for a bunch of apis like canvas. So each time you will look unique, but it changes every time so you’re not easily tracked. I’d assume it’s similar to what Brave does, but I haven’t looked into the details. Some stuff isn’t randomized by default, so they can get info like timezone and languages, but probably not enough to give you a unique identity.
Aye Firefox gang 🦊🤘
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All of the crypo crap can be turned off in settings.
And the setting really does work. The crap is completely gone afterwards. There is no grayed out symbols, or nag screens or anything.
Or more accurately: can be turned on. Everything crypto is disabled by default.
Functionality wise yes, but it’s visible in the UI and frontpage and that can be disabled/removed .
Firefox. Or if you don’t want to spend time configuring it, Librewolf.
I also recommend Librewolf. It’s very good at what it does. They also have a list of recommended addons to enhance your privacy.
The only issue with librewolf is that updates sometimes take a few days. For that reason I’m still using ff+arkenfox
I agree the crypto stuff is super annoying, but it’s a really nice and clean browser after you disable all that and tweak the settings (which you’d probably want to go through and configure with a new browser anyway)
even as a crypto user & dev, brave’s crypto shit is annoying af, it’s inferior by far to what everyone else uses & they push it on ur face & make u have to remove it.
i’d rather just use firefox or even microsoft edge, even for crypto stuff
Just switch off brave rewards and sponsored content. And, your fork is ready.
We recommend just switching to Brave and disabling the ‘crytpo crap’ yourself rather than using a fork that is liable to go unmaintained and miss updates.
So much this. I’ve seen countless of spite forks. Very few of them merged the updates.
Even large projects like Electron can’t keep up with chromium, and then there is downstream crap like Discord that can’t even keep up witch Electron.
If you want Brave without the crypto crap then spend a minute or two and turn it all off in settings. You’ll never see it again.
Except on Android, unfortunately. The overflow menu is full of all of those features right at the bottom – prime thumb real estate.
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Bromite used to be great, but unfortunately the dev seems to have abandoned it.
I’ve seen people talking about Mull, Mulch, Fulguris and a couple others. I think Mulch is tied to a specific Android ROM, and the others are Firefox forks.
I use fennec as my regular browser on android and mulch as the webview implementation
i left a big comment regarding this in another thread, TL;DR combination of brave on desktop and a lot of non-brave things on android, privacy browser + mull + DDG
I wouldn’t want Brave on anything myself. The company has proven it isn’t trustworthy many times over.
i agree, but my unpopular opinion is that mozilla has also proven this repeatedly, with nothing and nobody being universally better. privacy people love firefox, but i spend a lot of time with each major version’s release notes figuring out how to undo the new telemetry (increasing integration with pocket, firefox suggest, location that won’t turn off).
my threat model is ‘they’re all evil, including mozilla’, so there are additional rings around everything
LibreWolf is a nice upgrade in that regard. A Firefox fork where they remove a ton of that nonsense and improve some privacy settings.
FYI, they are also on Lemmy.
Mulch is tied to a specific Android ROM
Yes, that’s because it requires webview to be patched, it’s the same reason that Vanadium is only available for GrapheneOS. They do use some of Vanadium’s patches though.
It’s here now https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools
I literally saw a link in a thread on the OG’s github earlier today, sounds like this will be my new switch.
Although I’m still going to give Mulch a try, with a ROM that has it integrated into webview.
DivestOS is the only Android ROM I know of that integrates the Mulch webview. But Tad (DivestOS dev) also builds standalone binaries of Mulch that can be installed independently- just add their repo into f-droid or something like droidify and you’re good to go. Link: https://divestos.org/fdroid/official
Great, I’ll give that a try first. Still probably going to try DivestOS as well anyway, just for a fresh change.
If fingerprint protection is what I want, LibreWolf comes with a very sensible default as compared to stock Firefox. If I am familiar enough with about.config and stuff then hardened Firefox can reach bonkers levels of privacy as well
If a Chromium-based browser is required that has Brave’s level of privacy protection but none of the crypto nonsense… Yeah I’m not aware of any as of right now. Maybe once the Duckduckgo Browser becomes available?
well all the signs are pointing to librewolf I prefer gecko engine to chrominum, gonna give it a try
Looks like Brave is the best for privacy over all.
https://privacytests.org/That site and testing is run by a Brave employee, right? I’d be very skeptical of Brave’s high scores.
That’s with firefox on default settings. If you turn it on to ‘strict’ and install uBlock, then it wins.
yup thats the reason I wanna switch to it but damn wish there was a good fork that removed the bloat
To me, Brave or DuckDuckGo are as malicious as Google
What makes you think about duckduckgo like that?
They are less invasive on the privacy front, but they also push their products much harder down user’s throat due to less revenue from less accurate ads, just look at DDG’s frontpage.
I also found them self-censoring towards IPs from China, albeit this could be the direct result of using Bing’s search results.
It’s much easier to compare it with something like SearXNG which has the same core principle, without ads, without censorships, without invasive marketing.
At that point just use Firefox / Librewolf, os just turn off all of the brave rewards crap ( crypto )…
The mulvad browser?
The solution I chooses is using that along with hardened Firefox
well, brave’s crypto is opt in anyways, it wont be used unless you manually enable it yourself
Firefox paired with arkenfox’s userjs, or librewolf which basically configures all of that for you, are also good options.
